Mapuche (51 page)

“Are you all right, Duchess?” Susana whispered.

“Yes.”

Elena opened her eyes wide as if she had to hold reality in them lest it escape.

“An agent never destroys his archives.” According to Jana's letter, the former SIDE official had buried the original document at the foot of a young
ceibo
, the Argentine national tree. The guardian of the temple, Díaz, was supposed to have fled, leaving the document where it was: among the roots of the totemic tree. The Grandmothers waited impatiently behind Carlos, who was no longer young, notwithstanding his propensity for drinking alcohol at unsuitable times.

“Well?” Susana encouraged him.

“I've got it,” the bearded man finally said.

The two friends peered over the shoulder of the journalist, who was clearing away the last soil attached to the roots: a small cylinder was caught in the rhizomes. He pulled it out and then went to take refuge in the shade. Elena, who had the best eyes, adjusted her glasses and the magnifying glass they'd brought for the purpose. Then she unscrewed the lid. Inside the cylinder was a roll of film, just as Jana had said.

“What is it?” whispered the vice president, who couldn't see anything. “The ESMA form?”

Elena unrolled the film, still incredulous.

“Well?” Susana persisted. “What's going on? Elena? What's going on?”

“It looks like . . . a microfilm,” her friend murmured.

The names and dates were illegible at this scale, but they were miniaturized cards: some of them carried the infamous symbol of the ESMA, others did not. Elena Calderón continued to unroll the film, inspected it several times with the magnifying glass, and suddenly the Earth seemed to move. It was not only Samuel and Gabriella Verón's internment form: there were dozens, hundreds of others.

“Susana,” Elena whispered, shocked. “It's the microfilm . . . ”

“What? Do you mean
the
microfilm?”

Elena nodded under the scarf that protected her from the sun.

“Yes,” she said, convinced. “Yes, this is it. The microfilm of the
desaparecidos
. This is it, Susana. It exists. They're here.”

Susana and Carlos held their breath. The military men had destroyed the reports on clandestine operations in the late 1970s, General Bignone had done away with other documents in 1982, and the federal police had burned everything else a few days before Alfonsin was elected, but there were rumors that all the documents connected with the
desaparecidos
had been duplicated on a microfilm that was concealed in a safe in Panama or Miami, or more likely had been destroyed . . . Now, there it was before their eyes.

The reception of prisoners, the processing and recycling of information, periodic reports on the advancement of the “work,” names and matriculation numbers, actions authorized by the hierarchy, tours of guard duty, nocturnal thefts ordered by authorities further up the chain of command—Díaz had preserved on microfilm the internment forms of all the Argentine
desaparecidos
in a secret state document that had been entrusted to him, the patriot. The Grandmothers' eyes misted over. Their whole life was there.

Not only the truth about what had happened to their children and husbands: the truth about the disappearance of thirty thousand persons abducted by the dictatorship, what had been done with their remains, the part of Argentine history that had been stolen.

Susana pressed her sad Duchess's hand. The fate of Daniel and Elsa had to be on one of these miniaturized documents, but Elena Calderón was not afraid to confront it. Rubén believed that the truth would kill his mother, just as it had killed his father. He was wrong: Elena was fighting because a country without the truth was a country without memory. The fate of her husband and their daughter was only one part of the tragedy that bound together the Argentine people, victims and tormentors, passive participants and complicitous. Justice was there, between their trembling hands.

The Grandmothers could die in peace.

“Our search is over,” Elena whispered, her throat tight.

The old women shed a few tears as they thought about their compatriots, all those unfortunate people who, like them, could soon begin their work of mourning over all the unfathomable voids that the microfilm's revelations would fill, over the sick hearts that could finally be reconstructed. They wept in the garden, no longer knowing whether they were crying with joy or with relief as Carlos took them in his arms. He too was having a hard time controlling his emotions: “The truth is like oil in water: it always ends up rising to the surface,” as activists said.

The midday sun was blazing. Elena called Rubén, impatient to tell him the incredible news, but he didn't answer his cell phone.

The old woman's face grew dark.

“What is it?” Susana asked.

Elena tried again, several times, in vain: there was no answer.

Franco Díaz thought Argentines weren't ready to wash their dirty linen at home: that wouldn't happen for years, when his generation had passed on. It would be a long time before the
ceibo
tree in his garden grew and, as it flourished, one day spat out the truth. By that time, he would be gone, killed by cancer, and the last actors of that time would be dead, too.

Díaz didn't know that his neighbor, who had lost the suit he'd filed the preceding year, was spying on him day and night to prove that he was in fact polluting his garden. He also didn't know that Ossario was paranoid enough to have installed an infrared video camera at the window of his living room that covered his neighbor's whole Garden of Eden. And he didn't know that when Ossario was viewing one of the cassettes he had seen him bury something at the foot of the a young
ceibo
—Franco had even made the sign of the Cross over it before covering it with earth, looking all around him as if he were afraid someone might see him. The following night, Ossario had sneaked into Franco's garden, dug around in the still loose dirt, and found a cylinder that he had taken home with him. What he'd discovered that night went beyond anything he could have imagined. Díaz didn't know that Ossario, obsessed with the mystery, had feverishly copied dozens of pages of microfilm, put the cylinder back in its place just as dawn was breaking, and begun to work his way through the internment forms on
desaparecidos
, looking for witnesses. It was the scoop of his life. The name of Eduardo Campallo, the businessman who was constantly in the news at the time of his disgrace, was on one of the ESMA forms, as an
apropriador
: imagining his revenge as a springboard, the former paparazzo had contacted his daughter, María Victoria, and by that very act signed their death warrants. No, Franco Díaz didn't know the hidden agenda, but that didn't matter anymore: after spending five hours bound hand and foot in the trunk of the Audi, suffocating on the gag, without morphine to relieve his pain, the old SIDE agent had told her everything he knew.

Jana had listened to his revelations without showing the slightest emotion, and then offered him a deal. Paralyzed by the violence that emanated from her irises, already feeling the cold knife in his sick flesh, Díaz had obeyed all her orders.

The forest where she had dragged him was compact. Chained to the trunk of a large araucaria, the SIDE agent had watched her silently daub her face with black. The Mapuche had left before dawn, carrying her backpack, her rifle, and her other weapons, still without saying a word. The night had been long, cold, and anxiety-producing. What if she had abandoned him there? What if she never came back? Díaz had thought he heard gunshots far away in the forest, then it was silent again. He had finally dozed off, frozen with cold and fear.

The Indian woman had reappeared shortly before dawn, leading her prisoners. There were three of them, tied up; the thinnest was staggering, his tibia obviously broken, and he was being supported by an old, emaciated man in a cassock. The third man was unconscious, wrapped in a blanket that the Indian was dragging through the trees. Franco recognized his friend von Wernisch despite his pitiful appearance: the cardinal, manifestly shaken by what had happened to him, tried to communicate with him, but Franco Díaz didn't dare reply. He was forbidden to talk, to move, or to make signs to anyone: the Indian had been clear about that. First, she grouped the prisoners in the middle of the clearing, tied their feet, and then gagged the wounded man and the wretched cardinal. Then, terrible under her painted mask, she used a dagger to shred their clothes.

Kept at a distance, Díaz was given favored treatment: fresh water, his ankles unbound if not his wrists, and he was allowed his precious doses of morphine, which the Indian gave him in small amounts. On seeing the captives, the botanist shivered: the big guy he'd seen two days earlier in the courtyard of the monastery emerged, his face bashed up and covered with piss and blood. A few paces away, the Indian continued to dig her hole, silently, methodically.

“What . . . What are you doing?” Díaz dared to say.

But, concentrated on her task, she seemed not to hear him.

The Mapuches had assimilated horses better than the
winka
, who had brought them to the continent. Their horses were faster and had more endurance, and the rest was settled with lances. Since treaties bound only those who believed in them, native surprise attacks and raids were common along the frontier. The warriors brought mounts and captives back to camp, where each victory over the
winka
, the invaders, was celebrated. White women were treated according to the chief's appetites, and the men were literally thrown to the dogs. Reduced to sleeping outdoors, half-naked and starving, the Christians soon looked as wretched as the dogs. Beaten, humiliated, gnawing on the remains that had escaped the greedy jaws of the canines, shivering with cold and despair, the captives' lives depended on chance. The Mapuches killed them before eating their hearts; the head was then carefully stripped of its flesh and contents and transformed into a
ralilonko
, a trophy cup from which they drank
chicha
, a corn liquor. The leg bones were emptied out, cut, and used as flutes to make the souls of the sacrificed sing. Among the Mapuche, during wartime every­thing was daubed in black, from the symbolic weapon of the
gentoqui
, the master of the battle-axe, to the warriors, the
conas
, who painted their faces with charcoal before going into battle. Jana had found suitable pigments, which she had mixed with water to obtain a dark-colored paste. In using the pigments of her childhood, she rediscovered her artist's soul, her Mapuche soul. That did not console her.

An hour passed, punctuated by the rasping of the shovel and the first bird calls. Diesel roused himself from his torpor, stretching his stiff limbs after a nap in the ferns. The sun was coming up over a forest redolent of moss, and the prisoners didn't move from their mire. The gags made breathing difficult for them, and they suffered from cramps, cold, and despair. El Picador glanced painfully at his friend: a viscous liquid was oozing from his tibia fractured by a large-caliber bullet, every movement cost him great pain, and Parise had abandoned them to their fate. At his side, immured in his torment, the old cardinal had stopped moaning: he was watching with glassy eyes the movements of the devil flitting among the tree branches. El Toro, by far the most rebellious despite the condition of his jaw, was still grumbling, his wrists bloody from his efforts to free himself. A dense rage that left him powerless. They were no more than three stiff bodies thrown in the mud of a remote forest, naked and drenched to the bone, with that fucking dog that kept coming to sniff their asses.

“Get out of here!” he muttered into the mess in which his lost teeth were soaking.

El Toro wanted to kill every living being, and the girl was still digging. She hadn't gagged him, as she had the others, and she had urinated on him to clean his wound. What was she saving him for?

Diesel limped over to his mistress, who no longer saw him. Sweat was running off her face, making rivulets in the remains of the black pigment. The hole was deep and her hands hurt, but Jana was no longer of this world. A cosmogony of disaster. In the drama of the dead, she had become Kulan, “the terrifying woman.”

Jana dropped the shovel, tears in her eyes.

Diesel, who was lapping the water that had collected in the mire, perked up his ears and instinctively ran away when she approached. Alerted by the mutt's brief yapping, El Toro snorted. The Indian's silhouette was coming out of the thicket, her face blackened, fearsome under her madwoman's mask. The prisoners twisted about in an effort to escape, but tied up as they were, they wouldn't go far. Jana caught El Picador by his good foot and dragged him into the trees. Díaz hid behind his trunk, pursued by the prisoner's muffled groans. She attached a rope to the ankle of El Picador's broken leg and threw it over a branch of the big araucaria.

Yes, Jana was crazy: crazy with pain.

El Picador screamed through his gag when she winched his leg up to the branch.

 

*

 

Diesel had disappeared. A gentle rain was falling at dawn and a breath of horror floated over the clearing.

Hanging by his ankle from the araucaria, El Picador had stopped moaning. Jana no longer had the strength to haul his whole body up, despite her leverage system; half his torso was touching the ground, his whole weight pulling on the suspended leg with its fractured tibia. The Christian was no longer moving, his eyes rolled back and his gag loose, as if the fear of being dismembered had frozen him in this improbable posture.

Jana was waiting in the shade of the branches: Mapuche time, which counts seconds as hours and starts the day at dawn. The winching and El Picador's muffled cries had terrified the captives. They had tried to get away, but naked and hobbled, they had succeeded only in paddling about in the morass. Von Wernisch wouldn't last much longer; a stunted skeleton shivering with cold, an artillery shell from another war forgotten in the mire, the old cardinal had faded away. El Toro was still mumbling; he was probably used to muck and insults. Jana was meditating in the shelter of the trees, her eyes closed, immobile, a cruel and magical statue. The spirit of Kulan was still prowling around her, but she was no longer alone with her double: Shoort, Xalpen, Shenu, Pahuil, her grandmother's spirit ghosts were returning to her after a long journey, all her old dream companions, cousins in blood and matter, all the old witnesses of the aboriginal time that accompanied her in her agony. She saw again Rubén's face in the bedroom when she had left him—memories with blinded eyes.